A curmudgeonly colleague of mine claims that he prefers
automatic teller machines to human bank tellers because, "the machine knows me
better, and it always says, 'thank you.'"

He may be on to something. Online retailers Overstock.com,Zappos.com, and Amazon.com came in 2nd, 3rd, and 4thin the , right behind 1stplace winner L.L. Bean, the catalog-retailing giant. Television shoppingchannel QVC came in fifth, which means that none of t...